 Welcome back to the 21st Convention 2017 of Rolando, Florida, 10-year anniversary special event. As I mentioned to you guys and told you very explicitly and clearly the beginning of this event, and when you guys are at your goody bags and throughout the event, this convention has been dedicated specifically to Andrew the Private Man, Andrew Hansen. He was an alumni speaker of the 21st Convention 2016, down in Miami, Florida. He was also a confirmed speaker for this event before he died. I thought very much about trying to push this event up throughout the year to actually have him speak again before he died, but I talked to him about that and decided he knew better than I did that was a bad idea. As it turned out he did die sooner than we thought earlier in this year. I believe in March 3rd when I'm mistaken. He was the first speaker to ever take this stage and contribute to the platform and then die. When I started this when I was 17, those kind of thoughts would have never and did not occur to me. It did occur to me years ago that at some point of the dozens and over 100 speakers we have that eventually one of them, actually all of them would die, of course. But having had it happen in our 10-year anniversary this year was pretty intense. On top of an already incredible year that were things have been changing at a pace that I don't even have words for in a very positive way, of course. With that said, Andrew Hansen, Andrew the Private Man was, before I even get into my own personal take on him, he was a Red Pill blogger and philosopher and author for those of you who are not specifically aware of him. That is a big deal in itself, but that is an understatement. The Red Pill community is not that big as a branch of the Manisphere. To lose a major author like Andrew and Speaker is a huge fucking deal. This was a big loss for a community that really, really did not need that. And he is sorely missed, not just for his contributions and his theories and his thoughts, but his sense of life and who he was. He was a very positive person, he was very, I don't know if joyful is the word, but cheerful. Even considering dealing with the Red Pill, which is not usually associated with being cheery, he was an incredibly human being, top to bottom, an incredible man. Having made the Red Pill transition or taking the Red Pill very late in his life, I believe in his late 40s, about 47, 48, which is unusual. With that said, the last thing he ever said to me was at his girlfriend's house at the time of his death where he ended up dying earlier this year. Tracy, who was at this event, and she spoke yesterday about Andrew as well. The last thing he ever said to me was, make sure I live forever. He said this not only to me, but I believe Rolo as well. And with me specifically though, he made video, the videos from the convention that we filmed with him. His presentation, which you see up here, a picture of, as well as his interview with Socrates, as well as his contribution to the Q&A panel from last year at the convention in Miami. When I started this company, again, I could have never imagined that someone who was about to die would ask me very sincerely and very seriously to ensure he lives forever using the platform I built and that he contributed to massively and positively. To say I was honored is an understatement. I was nearly in tears. I had to suck him back as hard as I could. I don't know if that was absolutely necessary, but I thought given how much of a badass this guy was facing down death, literally with one eye, staring death in the eye with one eye, remaining eye, he died of a rare form of eye cancer for those of you who are unaware. Yeah, it was just, it was incredibly intense. And I did, as you, that was in person down in Miami, Florida, or South Florida earlier this year. He was very generous with his time. I got to visit him quite a lot, not just through the convention, which happened a few months before that, but I had various knee issues, medical issues with the doctor down there, so I could see him pretty frequently. And I'm very annoying and very pestering. He was an old man that would say, well, he would play this old man character hanging out with them, like, get off my lawn, all this stupid shit. It was awesome. I loved when he said that. And we had a, for the, about one year I knew him, not even I think. I got to call him a friend. And that was a very rapidly deformed friendship in part because I knew he was going to die. And I really, really put the effort in. And he reciprocated in kind. We had a lot of jokes. My favorite one was I'd always troll the shit out of him with gluten-free beer. I would, like, try to bring it over. And he'd text me like, no, don't fucking bring it over. I hate gluten-free beer. He said my one redeeming quality with that call is that I like whiskey. Because again, he hated gluten-free beer. I do have to make one final comment before passing it on to those speakers here who knew him. I had my best friend. I watched him die of cancer as well. He died at 22 years old when I was 19. That was 2008, August 1st. He and Andrew are two men that I've seen die of cancer slowly like this. And it sucks really, really bad. I fully respected and understood Andrew's choices that he did not pursue chemotherapy and all these different crazy therapies. Like, people would email him like, started drinking like cannabis oil and stuff, like all this stuff. He was like, nope, piss off. The courage he had to remain psychologically intact, and I have no doubt this is a terrifying beyond belief. I don't think he was absolutely fearless. It's that he continued his psychological framework, so to speak, for lack of a better word, all the way to his death. He was not afraid to the point that he would surrender who he was or submit. And that was really, really bad ass. I'll never forget having lunch with him. There's a picture of us outside of the restaurant where he ended up buying it for me, too. It was fucking awesome. It was really expensive, too. Just staring at this guy across the table, having a connormal conversation. He was totally engaged. And this guy was about to die. He was not unaware of this. He was totally aware of it. 100% aware of his own mortality. And, yeah, just faced down death of one eye. I think it's very rare that men can do that, or it's unusual. And to see that live and in person was just like, holy shit. I love this guy. All that said, Rolo. If you have my third book, the forward of that book, and the dedication of Positive Masculinity, I dedicated that to Andrew's memory. All I can really do is just sort of give you the stories that I remember of him. I knew him a little bit longer than you. I can remember when I had made the move from Orlando, Florida, and I was moving back to Nevada, and I was really kind of rebuilding my life at that time. I was still in the process of writing the first book, and I hadn't quite finished it. I knew I was getting pretty close, but at the same time I had a lot of stress in my life because I moved from one job into another job. At the time I felt like I was kind of making a move backwards, and I'm just basically zeroing my life out and then rebuilding myself at the same time. I knew that there was some potential there, and I knew that the first book was going to be something special, but this is a time before all of that. I think it was like in July of 2013, and I was listening to a podcast, and I think it was just like Manisphere Podcast or Manisphere Radio or something like that, and it was him, and he was on there, and I bumped into him a couple of times just online in virtual worlds, and I had a conversation with him back and forth, and this is the first time I think I had really experienced someone who I only knew digitally in a personal way. I listened to him, and like I said, I was going through a bad time, but I listened to him on this radio or this podcast, and he just sounded so real and so authentic, and it wasn't just this sales pitch. I was really used to guys with blogs, and we didn't even really call it a red pill back then, but not as we know it now, but he was just so authentic, he was just so real, and I remember listening to his voice and just sort of, you know, I tell this story in the forward of the book, but it just kind of hit me that this guy was like the real deal, and it wasn't like a sales pitch or it wasn't some pickup artist type, you know, I'll be your friend if you pay me X amount of dollars kind of thing, and so I reached out to him, and after I'd listened to that and I just, you know, bounced some ideas off of him, and he already knew who I was, and he was like happy that he was like, oh, I can't believe you called me or you emailed me. So we had some personal emails going on back and forth for a while, and then we started, he started calling me, and he wanted a few people that I almost instinctively trust with my personal phone number, and so I started talking to him, and every once in a while we would talk and he would tell me what was going on, and in one of those conversations, he says, you know, I could tell you something was wrong with him, he says I got cancer, and it was right before he got the eye patch he had his eye removed, and he says I think I'm going to lose my eye, and he was really upset about having, you know, he was going to lose his eye, he was going to have to, you know, kind of have that depth perception problem, and so we started talking about that, and I could tell it was really emotionally, you know, bothering him at that time, but so, you know, we were talking about Red Pill stuff, and then he just kind of gets real personal, and he gets real, you know, like he's known me for forever, and I think if he had a talent, it's like, you know, even if you just know him for a year, it feels like you've known the guy for a long time, and a lot of people want it, I'm not going to get all, you know, fortune cookie on you, but I think he was an old soul, and you know, going out as early as he did, and he also makes that seem a little bit more concrete, and so he tells me, you know, I'm going to lose my eye, and you know, here I'm trying to joke, I said, well, you're going to look cool, because you're going to get to wear eye patch legitimately, you know, without having to make up some story about it, and so he was laughing, and we're just going to cheer him up, and then he lost his eye, and then we thought it was a remission, and you know, so we're talking back and forth, and he asked me, he asked me if I could, if I could front him some money for his cell phone, because he was, he wasn't able to make his cell phone bills, and so I gave him the money, and like trying to, you know, okay, 800 bucks no problem, you're good, and I just did it with, just instinctively, because the guy was just a really cool guy, and I don't know, then it was just sort of an off and on thing that we had between the time you lost his eye, and then the time you died, and most of the time it was about, our conversations were really about red pill stuff, but then we would start out that way, but then they get a lot deeper than that, and then that's why, you know, I wanted to dedicate the book to him, and I really wanted to have, you know, some sort of memorial like you were saying, you know, don't let my spirit die, and I wanted to, you know, make a mark on the world, and I really, I quoted this before, but, you know, Steve Jobs always said, I want to make a dent in the universe, and I really think that Andrew made a dent in the universe in sort of an unorthodox way, but just was, like I said, an old soul, and I think really a great soul, and so when he finally got back to me and says, yeah, the cancer's back, I tried to slide it, and I was like, oh, God, you know, it's just that pit, you know, when you know somebody's going to go, and just like you were saying, I mean, the way we go out as men, the way that we die, is, I think, just as significant as how we live, so, I mean, that sounds real brave heart and very, you know, Hollywood-y, and it's really, it's really easy to build ourselves up and like, watch a movie, and, you know, watch, you know, William Wallace, you know, Die at the Infrareda, and that kind of stuff, or, you know, these really Hollywood romanticized endings to, you know, great men, but I don't think what we really appreciate is staring death down in such a way, and accepting it, and I think that the stages of death, when we're talking about the acceptance of grief and going through these different cycles, you know, acceptance, and I think he didn't even have a problem with that. I think he just went straight from like, you know, maybe he was a little bit angry, maybe he was a little bit sad, but he went straight to just accepting it, says, you know, this is the way it is. So, I think if I remember him as one thing, I think he was very much a great soul, and I am honored to have known the guy. So, before you take that, I just want to make it something I don't think I ever told Rollo, I don't think anyone else. The singular primary reason I got Andrew to speak at the convention last year in Miami is because of Rollo linking his blog on the Rational Mail. Had I not seen that, I would have never found the private ban. So, it was all thanks to this guy. Yeah, I think the other one thing I left out is I had asked him to actually write the foreword to the third book, and I, you know, I asked him to do that, you know, because I knew that if anybody could do that before they went out, he could do it, but it was just so aggressive and it took him so quick. So, I ended up having to write, you know, his own memorial and if you have the third book, just understand that that book is dedicated to him, and I wanted that to be his memorial because if anybody believed in positive masculinity, it was Andrew. I met Andrew on a blog. I had been basically kind of scrolling through a couple of things. I didn't quite understand the technology. The digital age was fairly new. The method of communication I didn't quite get. Why would somebody throw shit up on a website and think people would actually go to it? And so, it was kind of a realization that, you know, the average man may have something to say and that kind of changed the reality and it was interesting kind of reading the content and the connection and the flair that he had and then he did a really kind of odd thing. I knew he was in Florida. I knew I was in Florida and I knew that he lived in a particular area in one town and frequently I'd go back and forth between here in Miami and I'd pass by it and you'd kind of relatively think somebody I know is in that town that I've never met and I was always kind of fascinated by knowing people virtually and at some point he decided to host just a meet up nothing major, no fee just, hey, let's meet in this kind of beach side town and share a beer and have a connection and he literally sat down and he goes, I want to know my readers and he goes, I want to meet the people who are reading this and I was terribly moved by that. I thought it was rather remarkable and so everyone's kind of posting in the comment sections that are going to show up and next thing you know people are coming in out of state, they're flying in and I found that just incomprehensible that you would actually spend that amount of money time flying in a weekend just to meet somebody that you kind of had a friendship and a connection with virtually and what you start realizing is that the virtual connections can be very much as real as the interpersonal. You don't have as much dialogue but in many ways you have the capacity to think and comprehend and re-run those conversations explicitly by the written text and so you go and it was phenomenal to actually meet somebody, actually see somebody actually be able to come in and say, my God, it was nice to meet you and shake his hand and to create and look the man in the eye in a way in which you couldn't before I thought that was fantastic what out came from that is that it wasn't a whole lot of people but some of the people actually created strong friendships that then meet again on a regular basis because of it so it had a domino effect and it continued and what you find out with Andrew is what you see here on the screen even without the patch is really what you got you got an elderly gentleman that was wise that had character and he used to sit down and say that he brought out his inner pirate the reality is the pirate was there before the patch it really was and you knew when you find out that he's dying and he knew and he goes, we're all gonna die he goes, I'm just now on an accelerated schedule an inconvenient timeline an inconvenient timeline he had wicked humor I mean just really wicked humor and it was just kind of it's gonna sound really stupid when you have kind of a kindred spirit that way you really don't have to say much it's a privilege just to occupy space very much like right now with these gentlemen right here and even with all the other speakers before whether they're in the room or on stage with them you're just kind of amazed that our lives are driven to the point that this actually occurred he had an absolute understanding of it something that a lot of people don't know and it may be just because I'm kind of a geek this way myself his actual education is on map history and understanding the historical nature of maps not the boundaries based on rivers or anything else but by population groups how much area of influence did they have and this sort of training and background and love of history and that particular methodology of communication visually kind of formulated a lot of his thinking and we talked about feminism we talked about culture and everything else as far as maps on ideas moving across kind of plains and hills and stuff like that and it was terribly fascinating conversation having the fortune of actually meeting them before shooting the shit it was a pleasure actually seeing a prepared presentation and then it was doubly a pleasure to sit down and have the opportunity to interview them again afterwards to kind of draw that information out and my saddest moment wasn't the fact that I actually got to meet him and the loss because then very much I'll never see him again but I carry that spirit with me today the first time I opened up my house to the under 21 convention I had an opportunity very much like this man here did and I took and seized that opportunity to open my house my life in the same way he did virtually by having us all go down to where he lived you know and actually see the town and the people he knew and actually were able to meet and greet the people that he saw and wrote about on a regular basis this little tiny bar the other one was he held his own wake a celebration of his life to go explicitly to that and have the corpse come walking in with a damn grin okay was absolutely fantastic and you say again? yeah we got it on film what you probably won't see are all the little fine details I remember you know him reaching around and his girlfriend's ass all over all looking at him and he's giving it a squeeze you know just that sort of pirate nature that swagger the confidence he was not going to let his own wake get him down and he goes how many corpses actually have a chance to actually do this the other part that I found just really kind of almost kind of sad was that the bubbles of his life the spheres of his life came together for the first time there were three distinct spheres we knew that he had family we knew he had friends but in many cases they never knew we existed okay his own brother only realized that he had another complete different life and then through himself I kind of understanding that did not understand a lot of this stuff that was taking place even after the wake where we went out to say Buffalo Wild Wings to have beers and drinks and continue on and trying to explain it so it was really very very touching that his girlfriend and partner would actually show up for this event sit through the entire thing that she absolutely could see and actually experience what Andrew experienced on a regular basis to understand him to share in that idea of that man if I could pause you for a second the reason she's not here today on the fourth day but was here on the first, second and third she's actually had another wake today in Miami another business partner's son just died so we had her filmed yesterday and that's actually specifically why she's not here right now and the only reason so it was remarkable seeing how in another person how this man touched another life and it continued well beyond his death and as you get to know her you start to see the things that he fell in love with that he appreciated and it is very nice to be able to have that additional connection with her his spirit, his ideas and that you sit down and go the man's gone but his soul is still here and very much with us and I'm not letting that go I'm just not letting that go Alright so when I first started reading Private Man when you read his writing you really recognize he has his own unique voice and it's a very special voice especially early on in the red pill when I was getting into it he was one of the first blogs I read and I was drawn to it because he had such a joy coming out of him even though he was talking about these harsh realities these red pill realities he still made you feel like it was going to be okay in the long run it's okay that you know the truth you can still be a happy person so I read him for a couple of years we interacted online and then on my road trip around the country in 2015 we were in touch and I asked him to do an interview and he invited me right to his home and this was in his little city by the sea in South Florida I remember he took me inside his little modest home and he introduced me to the ugliest fucking dog I've ever seen in my life I swear to God it's like seeing an ugly baby you're just like I can't believe this dog is so ugly so the dog's name was Lucy he's like let's take Lucy for a walk I'll show you what I do with Lucy so he takes her out puts her on a little leash and he's taken her around the city by the sea and as soon as we get to the first corner two girls in bikinis come up and start petting the fucking dog and they're like this dog what is it we can't even tell what it is he's like I don't even know what it is he really didn't it was that much of an ugly mutt and I was just like this guy's awesome so from those first few minutes of interacting with him like I always call him like the uncle you wish you always had he really was that awesome uncle who has traveled the world done crazy shit he's done shit he promised to make me never tell anybody he's seen some stuff he's done some stuff so we ended up having a drink we did the interview back at his place we hung out a couple times in south Florida we had a really good connection and like I said he's that kind of person that old soul you know he's just there he was a genuine person when I heard about his death I knew of course he was going to pass but that day in March when I heard about his death it hurt like I woke up in the morning I saw the notifications and it hit me hard it was really like a relative it passed away and it was just because the world really lost a great person so if you go back to his blog and you read his stuff it's so beautiful that his stuff is memorialized like that because it's such a pillar you know because especially because of that attitude you see his face like it's just like I said that uncle you never had so that was I the last time I saw him was earlier this year when I came to visit some family in south Florida and we made an agreement to get together we're like yeah we'll just have lunch an innocent lunch so he ends up coming in an Uber picks me up in an Uber has this sneaky grin on his face he's like we're going to a strip club and I'm like fuck yeah we go to a clock on a Sunday we go to the strip club he pulls out a watt of 20s he's like here you go nephew you have fun and I'm like thank you uncle we seriously we spent we arrived at the strip club at like 2.30 we were there until probably 7pm drinking the whole time we get in another Uber we go back to another hotspot me and him we had burgers and then we just ran around I introduced him as my uncle we had charisma like unbelievable charisma and then like I was sliding in getting phone numbers everywhere and he was that like cool uncle and we just we had so much fun playing off that dynamic like that little acting dynamic he lasted we were we kept drinking until about midnight so from 2.30pm till about midnight and this is just a few months before this guy passed away of cancer like so much respect for Andrew please go read his stuff and make it a part of you because the joy that he had for life was just something so beautiful he really is the uncle you wish you had gentlemen any last words he was a great soul you know how they have I think in in some religions they believe that there are brahman souls and there are cast and levels of souls I believe that he was a great soul thank you men thank you for your attention